Keeping MDT’s readers informed about a mind-bogglingly broad range of
technical advances, product innovations,
market requirements, and regulatory issues
has proven to be the most challenging
assignment of my 20+ year career in tech
journalism. My mission got a bit easier this
month however, when I attended the Med
in Ireland 2017 conference in the beautiful
city of Dublin. Enterprise Ireland’s showcase for the nation’s Med Tech industry
offered a global perspective that helped me
step back and identify some of the trends
that will play a dominant role in defining
the environment our industry will be operating in during next year or so.

During the conference, I got to spend
time with some of the island’s 250+
medical research, design, and manufacturing companies, many of which serve their
domestic market as well as doing a brisk
trade overseas. In the process, I learned
about several technologies that have not
made it to America’s shores yet, and got a
new perspective on the global healthcare
market.

Likewise, the speakers at Med in
Ireland’s plenary sessions provided some
valuable insights on important trends and
issues in the Global Healthcare and MedTech markets. Many of them were the
same ones we face in the U.S., but it was
enlightening to see how other countries’
healthcare systems were dealing with them.

Three meta-trends emerged from these
conversations that I believe will strongly influence what we will be designing, and how
design them. These trends will help guide
our coverage during 2018.

Data-Driven Healthcare Services
and Strategies: The ongoing digitization
of medicine is using powerful tools, including Big Data, the Io T, Artificial Intelligence,
and Deep Learning to improve the speed,
effectiveness, and safety of nearly every part
of the healthcare delivery chain.

Many hospitals, for example, are implementing care management systems that
track every aspect of a patient’s condition,
treatment, and routine care. These systems
use powerful data analytic tools to track,
analyze, and adjust a patient’s treatment
strategy during their stay. Similar techniques
help provide post-discharge follow-up that
may include remote monitoring as well as
interactive coaching on post-surgical care,
exercise, diet, and other lifestyle changes.

Data-Driven Medicine will require
changes to the way we design many existing
medical products, and create many opportunities for new ones. Soon, nearly any medical device that touches a patient will need
to be able to navigate the Io T in a reliable,
secure, manner. This may even extend to
medical supplies, such as “smart” syringes
and wound dressings that include embedded RFD chips to help track when, where,
and how patient care is administered. Meanwhile, new generations of wearable sensors
that communicate with AI-driven analytic
tools will help us do better at managing
chronic diseases and staying healthy enough
to remain at home as we age.

Value-Based Compensation Models:

Since America and many European nations
are struggling with spiraling healthcare costs,
both government agencies and commercial
insurance providers are exploring new strategies to bring those costs under control. The
approach that drew the most interest at the
conference is value-based payment models,
also known as outcome-oriented treatment
strategies. This alternative to the fee-for-service payment model that has dominated
many markets, including America, would
to compensate healthcare providers for
the outcomes they deliver rather than the
number of visits, procedures, prescriptions,
or devices they provide. Early experiments
with creating incentive value-based structures
for healthcare have proven to be challenging,
shown some promising results.

Jan Wittenber, Member of IEEE and Fellow at the
Center for Medical Interoperability

Derek Young, Founder & CEO, i360medical Ltd.

3 Lessons from Ireland

The chances are good that, at least in the
U.S., both commercial health insurance providers and what’s left of the Medicare/Med-icaid system after the current administration
gets finished “right-sizing” it will be adopting
value-based compensation strategies for at
least some of the services they pay for. It’s
unclear yet what types of services, devices,
and products will be most affected, but it’s
one of the issues that MDT will be tracking
closely in the coming year.

Democratization of Healthcare: The
last few years have seen amazing technical
advances that could help deliver high quality affordable healthcare to people in both
emerging and developed economies. Breakthroughs in electronics, materials, and biochemistry have enabled the development of
low-cost diagnostic and therapeutic devices
that can help a neighborhood clinic deliver
a much wider range of services. These, and
advances in wearable sensors and telemedi-cine are beginning to play important roles in
bringing basic services to remote villages in
Africa and Asia.

The technologies that are democratizing
healthcare in emerging economies also
may have important applications here in
America. Bold entrepreneurs may be able to
use them as the basis for new platforms that
deliver affordable healthcare to the growing
percentage of our population the current
systems are failing to reach.

How will these meta-trends impact yourwork, or your segment of the industry? Writeme at lee.goldberg@advantagemedia.com.